A SaaStr AI deep dive with Sam Gutmann, CEO of Own, on building a billion-dollar backup company by saying “no” to almost everything. He joined Harpinder Singh (Partner, Innovation Endeavors) to share the whole story — and his top mistakes.
And come hear 200+ stories like this at SaaStr AI Annual May 12-14 in SF Bay!!
Top 5 Takeaways
1. The CEO who dismissed “Backup for Salesforce” as “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard” went on to build the category leader.
Sam literally stopped a board meeting to call out how stupid he thought the idea was. Six years later, he was running the company that would define the space. Markets evolve. Your priors can be wrong. The best founders update their views when the data changes.
2. Don’t expand until you cross $100M ARR if your core market is still only single-digit penetrated.
Own had backup for ServiceNow, Microsoft, and other platforms ready to go for years. They said no. They killed products that weren’t generating revenue. The result? 100%+ annual growth rates by staying focused on Salesforce until they had the resources to truly do multi-platform right.
3. The CEO ran the financial model himself until $200M ARR — and that’s why they hit their numbers.
When their outsourced CFO offered to run FP&A, Sam said “absolutely not.” Every investment tied back to a cell in his Excel model. The outsourced finance firm told him: “You’re the only founder where our FP&A team isn’t doing this for you. You’re also the only company actually making their numbers.”
4. “Ideas are worthless. It’s all about execution.”
Salesforce came out with a competing product. It didn’t work. They killed it. They tried again. It still didn’t work. Then they acquired Own. When you have 1,000 people waking up every day focused on being the best backup product in the ecosystem, the platform vendor with 150 other products to sell can’t match your focus.
5. The hardest leadership decision — replacing a founder or key leader who got you here — always takes too long.
At a CEO roundtable, every leader agreed: firing a founder or key leader is gut-wrenching. Then they asked who would have made that call six months earlier. Every hand went up. It’s always the right decision. It always takes too long.
The Origin Story: A Vacation That Changed Everything
The story starts in the most unlikely way possible.
Sam Gutmann was on vacation in Israel in 2014. He had zero network there. But he remembered that a former colleague who’d worked at the venture fund that invested in his first company had quit his job, traveled the world, and landed in Israel.
“Let’s catch up over a beer,” Sam said. “By the way, I’m at a venture fund now. Know any startups I can meet?”
His friend Ori said: “Yeah, I’m actually job hunting. I’m meeting with these two guys who started a backup company. Want to tag along to my unofficial job interview?”
Sam had the tour van driver pull over in a city he’d never heard of called Herzliya. They sat down at a coffee shop with Ariel (the founding CTO) and two friends who’d started a part-time project called OwnBackup.
Halfway through the meeting, they turned to Ori and said, “Please stop selling yourself. We’re not hiring a sales guy.”
Then they turned to Sam: “We actually are hiring a CEO. Are you interested?”
That one-hour coffee ruined the rest of his vacation. But ten years later, they sold to Salesforce.
The Irony: Sam Thought This Was a Terrible Idea
Here’s the thing that makes this story remarkable.
In 2008, Sam was in a board meeting for his first company — an online backup service where software ran on servers and sent encrypted data to the cloud. They were brainstorming growth ideas.
The chairman walked up to the whiteboard and wrote in red marker: “Backup for Salesforce.”
Sam stopped the meeting.
“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
Six years later, he was CEO of the company that would define that exact category.
What changed his mind? Simple math and pattern recognition:
Salesforce had 250,000 customers. Every single one should have a data protection strategy.
The average enterprise uses 300+ B2B applications. The same vulnerability exists whether your data is on a laptop, an AWS instance, or in Salesforce.
Every B2B provider uses the same language: “shared responsibility model.” They’re responsible for the platform. You’re responsible for your own data.
Sam likens it to an apartment building: the landlord handles the infrastructure, windows, pipes, and elevators. But you’re responsible for everything inside your unit.
The Path to Product-Market Fit
The founders of Own had an unusual origin story themselves. They ran a traditional disaster recovery lab — the kind where you bring in your water-damaged phone or server with a failed RAID array, and they recover your data.
Around 2010, customers started coming in saying: “You’ve recovered data from my devices before, but now I’ve lost something in the cloud. Facebook shut my account down. I permanently deleted something in Gmail. Can you help?”
They couldn’t. They didn’t have access to Facebook or Google servers.
After enough of those conversations, they started the first cloud-to-cloud backup in 2010. For two and a half years, it was a part-time project.
Then, about a month before Sam arrived, they won a large enterprise customer in the U.S.
That changed everything. Now it was: let’s spin this out of the services company, focus full-time, and find a management team that’s done this before.
When Sam joined, they were close to product-market fit. He spent the rest of 2014 pressure-testing it. He installed Own on his family business’s Salesforce instance. He installed competitors. He deleted data. He tested whether they could actually recover it.
His framework for evaluating the opportunity:
Is the market huge? Yes — 250,000+ Salesforce customers, plus every other SaaS platform.
Is it a real problem? Yes — his friend Ori had personally lost data in Salesforce while consulting.
Does the solution work? Yes — they proved it through testing.
Can we build a company here? Yes — not just a product, but a real business.
The Power of Focus: How Own Got to $100M Before Expanding
When Sam joined, Own had products for multiple platforms: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and Salesforce. They were also close to releasing backup for ServiceNow.
His first decision as CEO: kill everything except the product generating money.
“It wasn’t until we crossed $100 million ARR that we decided we had enough resources to actually expand.” This wasn’t easy. People constantly came to him with ideas for new ecosystems. The answer was always no.
“One of the hardest things to do is say no. People go, ‘I have an idea. We want to do this ecosystem.’ No, let’s keep focusing on what we do best because it’s working.”
His logic was simple: when you’re growing 100% a year and the market is only single-digit penetrated, why dilute yourself? Why dilute the team? Why spend money in places where you don’t know the ROI when you have a proven market with massive headroom?
The metric he used to determine when to expand: $100M ARR.
At that point, the flywheel was running. He had freedom to think longer-term. He could start planning what the business should look like two to three years out.
Building the Salesforce Relationship
If you’re building in and around an ecosystem, someone’s full-time job should be managing that relationship.
Own hired someone early whose entire job was building the alliance between Own and Salesforce. Not the CEO having an occasional meeting and dropping the ball on follow-up. A dedicated person.
“If you’re building in and around an ecosystem, it’s really important that it’s someone’s full-time job. You really need to invest in these ecosystems.”
Was he worried about dancing with the gorilla?
Every board meeting, every investor meeting, the question came up: what if Salesforce competes with you?
Sam’s answer: “It was not one of the top 10 things I worried about every day when I woke up.”
His reasoning:
Salesforce AEs have 150+ products to sell. They were never going to focus on backup as well as Own could.
Salesforce did release a competing product. It didn’t work. They took it off the market.
They tried again. It still didn’t work.
Eventually, they decided to acquire the best technology.
“Ideas are worthless. It’s all about execution. We got up every day and a thousand people were trying to execute. How do we build the greatest backup product in the ecosystem?”
The Metrics-Obsessed Approach That Made Own Hit Its Numbers
Sam ran the financial model himself from day one.
“I’ll never forget this. My first trip to Israel when I officially joined the company, I had terrible jet lag. I took a monitor back to my hotel room and I was doing this gigantic Excel model — down to how much we’re going to spend on coffee every month.”
He ran that model for years.
When the outsourced CFO offered to take over FP&A and run the budget, Sam said: “Absolutely not. That’s my job. I need to understand the business. I want my leaders to understand the business.”
The CFO walked away, then came back with an observation:
“You’re the only founder where our FP&A team isn’t doing this for you. You’re also the only company that’s actually making their numbers.”
Every investment, not just coffee, tied back to a cell in the model. It was how Sam thought about the business and how he wanted his leaders to think about it.
Their board decks ran 100-200 pages by the end. The strategy was partly defensive (“If there’s enough data in there, we can just spend the entire time going through it and they don’t have time to ask questions”). But it reflected a genuine culture of measurement.
After board meetings, they’d pare down the deck to fit a 45-minute town hall and share as much as possible with the entire company.
“Did every SDR remember every metric? No. But that trust and transparency helps build trust with our employee base. It helps people think about the decisions they’re making better.”
Culture Can’t Be Outsourced to HR
Sam interviewed every employee through about 400 hires. He probably should have done it through 1,000.
At some point, he wasn’t interviewing for technical skills — he trusted the manager for that. He was interviewing for cultural fit.
“People are working their butts off, and if they’re not enjoyable to be around and good energy, it’s really hard to scale.”
His philosophy on culture:
Culture is not something HR owns. It starts at the top.
You can’t outsource it. Every decision should consider: how could this impact culture?
Every new employee should understand they’re part of the culture. It’s their job to commend colleagues who uphold values and remind people when they don’t.
The reviews on Salesforce’s AppExchange tell the story. Own had five times more reviews than their closest competitor. Many weren’t just “the product works.” They said things like: “The product works, but Josh in support was awesome” or “Jane, our sales rep, wasn’t trying to sell me. I was treated as a real partner.”
That’s whole product — not just technology, but everything around it.
The Hardest Thing: Knowing When to Replace Leaders
A sales leader who can scale from zero to $200M is the exception, not the rule.
“There are great sales leaders that can go from zero to a million, or one to ten million, or ten to a hundred. That person is probably not the person that’s going to go from 100 to 200. That’s perfectly fine.”
Sam’s perspective: a leader who’s great at 1-10 should do that 5-10 times in their career. They’ll be happy and make good money. If they’re stretching way beyond their comfort zone, they’re probably miserable and you’re probably not making your numbers.
At a CEO roundtable, the moderator asked: “What’s the hardest challenge you have to deal with?”
Almost everyone agreed: firing a founder or key leader.
Then the follow-up question: “Once you’ve done it, who would have not wanted to do it six months prior?”
Everyone.
“It’s always the right decision. It always takes too long.”
The moderator, a successful entrepreneur who’d nearly taken his company public before selling, offered perspective: “I agree. When I was running a thousand-person company, it was the hardest thing to do. But now I own a professional sports team. When I make a change to the roster, there’s millions of angry fans tweeting at me that I’m a jerk. I would die to go back to a thousand-person software company and make a change like that.”
Hire People Who’ve Done It Before
Sam was always a fan of hiring people who have done it before, not just smart athletes.
One of Own’s other investors put it bluntly:
“Look, we gave you a lot of money to go execute as fast as you can. We didn’t give you a lot of money to go try. So why are you betting on someone that may be able to do it? Go buy the person that’s done it before two or three times.”
That doesn’t work in every role. You have to consider what it would do to culture to bring someone too many steps ahead. But generally: bring someone who’s done one or two steps beyond where you are today, and you’ll get there faster.
On sales leadership specifically: when you think you’ve hit product-market fit or you’re close, figuring out how to operationalize and institutionalize the sales process is critical.
“It’s great to have a lone wolf sales rep that exceeds quota, but that’s not replicable.”
Doing this too late means you might get a few sales early, but scaling becomes much harder.
The Decision to Sell to Salesforce
Own wasn’t running an active sale process. They were talking to bankers about an IPO.
But they’d known the Salesforce team for years. Salesforce Ventures had invested in their seed round alongside Innovation Endeavors and continued to support them. By the end, Own was one of Salesforce’s top five ISV partners.
The conversation started as: if there’s another round, would Salesforce participate?
At some point, Salesforce said: “Why don’t we just buy you?”
It wasn’t 2021 anymore. Markets had changed. But Sam kept coming back to the mission: every one of those 250,000 Salesforce customers should have data protection. The fastest way to get Own’s technology into every customer’s hands was through Salesforce’s go-to-market and distribution.
Was the threat of Salesforce competing a factor in the decision?
“A little bit. If they wanted to make our lives miserable, they could. But this is really going to be a strategic focus for them. They’re talking about agents and AI. I don’t think they’re going to turn the organization on a dime just to compete with us.”
It was one of ten factors they considered. But the primary driver was accelerating the mission while generating a strong return for early investors.
Why Own Worked: Whole Product Thinking
The product worked. That sounds obvious, but Sam remembers a competitor whose product could back up data but couldn’t restore it. (Backup without restore is just storage.)
But more importantly, Own thought about whole product — not just the technology, but every touchpoint.
Their reviews consistently mentioned people by name. Support was great. Sales reps weren’t pushy. Customers felt like partners, not targets.
“I think it comes down to people and culture. The product works, but Josh in support was awesome. The product works, but Jane, our sales rep, wasn’t trying to sell me.”
Expanding After $100M: Learning New Languages
When Own finally expanded to ServiceNow and Microsoft after $100M ARR, they learned you can’t just plug-and-play from one ecosystem to another.
The Salesforce ecosystem is unique. If you’ve been to Dreamforce, you know — there’s a stage where you’re learning something and stuffed animals walking around. That doesn’t exist at Microsoft or ServiceNow.
The ServiceNow ecosystem speaks a different language. What customers call things is different. Own tried to apply their Salesforce playbook directly at first and had to reboot with different people who understood those ecosystems natively.
“We screwed up at first when we thought we could just kind of plug and play exactly what we did in Salesforce to these other ecosystems.”
The No-Substitute Lesson: Hard Work
When asked what to look for in a sales leader, Sam’s answer goes beyond track record and methodology.
“The most important thing to look for is simply how hard do they work. There is no substitute for hard work when building a startup.”
When Own was based in Israel but selling to the U.S. market, everyone at Microsoft’s startup accelerator would leave at 6-7 PM. Ghost town. Except for Ori, Own’s head of sales.
“When I came to Israel, we’d work until midnight, one, two o’clock in the morning. We were the only people in the office. But we were also the only company in that cohort closing deals.”
Sam’s Top 5 Mistakes (With the Benefit of Hindsight)
1. Trying to plug-and-play the Salesforce playbook into new ecosystems
When Own finally expanded to ServiceNow and Microsoft after $100M ARR, they assumed they could apply the same go-to-market approach. Wrong. Each ecosystem speaks a different language, calls things different names, and has different buyer personas. They had to reboot with new hires who were native to those ecosystems. Should have known sooner that ecosystem expansion requires starting fresh, not copying what worked before.
2. Not interviewing every employee all the way to 1,000
Sam interviewed every hire through about 400 employees, focusing on cultural fit. He says he probably should have kept going to 1,000. The cultural foundation gets set early, and every hire that doesn’t fit the culture dilutes it. By the time you realize there’s cultural drift, you’ve compounded the problem across dozens of hires.
3. Taking too long on difficult leadership transitions
Every CEO at that roundtable said the same thing: when they finally made the hard call to replace a founder or key leader, they wished they’d done it six months earlier. Sam admits Own was no different. The instinct to give people more time, to hope they’ll grow into the role, to avoid the discomfort — it always costs more than it saves. The decision is always right, and it always takes too long.
4. Not investing in multi-platform earlier (maybe)
This one comes with a caveat: Sam isn’t sure it was a mistake. Their singular focus on Salesforce until $100M ARR drove incredible growth. But he acknowledges they might have expanded sooner given how large the other ecosystems turned out to be. The ServiceNow and Microsoft opportunities were real. The question is whether starting earlier would have accelerated or diluted them.
5. Underestimating the power of in-person events
Own’s lead generation engine was built heavily on in-person events. Their largest investor at Insight Partners called in March 2020 with alarming news: “We’ve done an analysis of our portfolio. You’re in the top three… of companies most exposed to getting all their leads from in-person events. The world just shut down, so you’re kind of screwed.”
They pivoted to online fast, but the wake-up call was harsh. A more diversified lead generation strategy would have reduced that risk. Though in fairness, the in-person approach worked extraordinarily well when events were happening.
The Bottom Line
Own’s story isn’t about backup technology. It’s about focus, measurement, and execution.
The market was huge. The problem was real. The solution worked. But plenty of companies have all three and fail.
What made Own work:
Saying no to expansion until they’d dominated their core market
A CEO who ran the financial model himself and tied every investment to a cell in a spreadsheet
Culture that started at the top and permeated every customer touchpoint
An ecosystem partnership strategy where someone’s full-time job was building that relationship
Hard work — being the only company in the accelerator still in the office at midnight, and being the only company closing deals
When Salesforce finally decided they needed data protection in their platform, they had one obvious choice: the company that had spent ten years becoming the best in the world at exactly that.
Sam Gutmann is the former CEO of Own (OwnBackup), which was acquired by Salesforce. He’s currently taking time off while his kids lobby for a full year sabbatical, running out of home renovation projects, and waiting for his next company to find him — ideally on vacation.
